Tensleep-Casper-Fountain

There would be a risen continent reaching its coast, with rivers running over bare rock past not so much as a lichen. There would be rich-red soil on a broad lowland plain resembling Alabama (but near the equator). There would be clear, warm shelf seas. There would also be a picture of dry hot dunes, all of them facing the morning sun-the rising Miocene sun. Other-and much older-dunes would settle a great question, for it is impossible to tell now whether they were just under or just out of water. They covered all of Wyoming and a great deal more, and my have been very much like the Libyan Desert: the Tensleep-Casper-Fountain Pennsylvanian sands. There would be a picture, too, of a meandering stream, with overbank deposits, natural levees, cycads growing by the stream. Footprints the size of washtubs. A head above the trees. In the background, swamp tussocks by the shore of an oxbow lake. What was left of that picture was the Morrison formation-the Jurassic landscape of particularly dramatic dinosaurs-outcropping just up the road. There would be various views of the great Cretaceous seaway, with its plesiosaurs, its giant tmtles, its crocodiles. There would be a picture from the Paleocene of a humid subtropical swamp, and a picture from the Eocene of kantoor per uur amsterdam gravel bars in a fast river running off a mountain onto lush subtropical plains, where puppysize horses were hiding for their lives. Such pictures, made in this place, could form a tall stackscene after scene, no two of them alike. Taken together, of course -set one above another, in order-they would be the rock column for this part of Wyoming. They would correlate with what one would see in the well log of a deep-drilling rig. There would be hiatuses, to be sure. In the rock column, anywhere, more time is missing than is there; so much has been eroded away. Besides, the rock in the column is more apt to commemorate a moment-an eruption, a flood, a fallen drop of rain-than it is to report a millennium. Like a news broadcast, it is more often a montage of disasters than a cumulative kantoor per uur eindhoven record of time. I asked Love why so much of the earth’s history happened to be here on the surface in this nondescript part of the state. He said, “It just came up in the soup. Why it is out here all by itself is a matter of fierce debate.” The Rawlins Uplift had not accomplished nothing.